I encourage all of you to click on that link and go read our investment rationale. There are a number of interesting trends we are betting on here and Rebecca articulates them well. There are also some examples of classes your kids can take that are amazing.

But what I want to talk about is how important services often start in the fringes and over time move into the mainstream. We are certainly betting that is the case with crypto-currencies. We have seen that with Airbnb (couch surfing>hotel alternative), Uber (ride sharing>car alternative), YouTube (video sharing>TV alternative), and so many other examples.

Homeschooling is a fringe market right now. But education is not.

Outschool can exist with excellent unit economics for the students, teachers, and company because there is a market of almost 2.5mm students in the US who need to learn things like Algebra, European History, Biology, etc, and will pay to do so.

But of course, there are over 50mm K12 students in the US and many more around the world who need to learn these subjects as well and often don’t learn them very well in the legacy schooling model.

When our kids were in school and struggled with a class/teacher/subject, we would get them a tutor to come to our home in the evenings. That is a 1%er solution and is not affordable for most families.

But the Outschool model, because of the scale it has reached in the homeschooling market, is driving down the cost of learning these subjects and can and does replace the high cost tutorial market for a number of families already. As its scale increases and economies kick in, it can reach more students and families desperate to master challenging material.

Great teachers are one of the most valuable resources we have in our society. I can trace much of what I know to a handful of these people.

But school buildings, classrooms, and the supporting Infrastructure for them are very much replaceable with new technology. Outschool is showing a way how to do that.

At USV, we seek to back trusted brands that can open up access to knowledge (and wellness and capital). Many (most?) of these brands start out on the fringes and move into the mainstream over time as they scale and the benefits become obvious to mainstream consumers. Outschool is squarely in the sweet spot of our thesis and I am excited to see what it can do for learners around the world in the coming years.

I remember back in the 2005/2006/2007 time frame when blogging and social media was coming of age, I used this blog as a petri dish to explore ideas like influencer marketing, social advertising, and virality that have become critical parts of a growth marketer’s playbook a decade later.

That “hacking around in social media” taught me so much that I could not have learned reading or talking to people. Of course, I did those things too, but getting my hands dirty with the technology and ideas helped me understand them and see the power of them and invest in them before others did.

So it is always great to see when other investors are doing the same thing.

Dani, one of our awesome analysts at USV, has been exploring the area of “free learning.” She has been writing about it. And she has been hacking around in it too.

Yesterday she launched a free learning game you play via text message.

I built a game this weekend that you can play over sms. If you text +1 (575) 223-1415 it will enter you into the game and send you some number puzzles. Enjoy and good luck. pic.twitter.com/oX6SVprfCQ

When I started my now ten-year journey down the “let’s teach computer science in our public schools” path, I knew that getting students to instruct machines would open up new methods of teaching and learning. But I did not understand just how powerful that would be.

It is good and necessary to offer dedicated classes in computer science to students. It is even better to use computer science to teach complex concepts in subjects like math, science, art, music, literature and more. When you do both, you can really impact student’s learning and comprehension.

I was in a high school class in the Tremont neighborhood of the Bronx yesterday. They were doing geometry lessons in Javascript.

They started with a lesson on the translation function and how it could be used to move objects around. This is a photo I took of the smartboard at the front of the classroom as the students discussed how this function works.

After this lesson, the students played a game of Battleship in Javascript with each other on their laptops.

This is a photo of the Bronx Borough President, Ruben Diaz Jr, playing Javascript Battleship with one of the students in the class.

Writing and editing code on a machine allows the student to see how geometric functions (and many other functions) work in a fun and interactive way and takes complex notions and makes them real and tangible to them. This is important and powerful.

I now believe that introducing computer science into the elementary, middle, and high school curriculum will not only help students master computational thinking but it will also help them master many other complex concepts and allow them to be better students and better adults.

When you look at industries that continue to operate on old, outdated, and highly regulated models (education, health care, banking, brokerage, etc, etc), it is interesting to look at the numbers of consumers who are opting out of the legacy model.

In K12 education, many people think of charter schools as the disruptive model and there are something like 3.5mm to 4mm students attending charter schools in the US now (out of roughly 55mm K12 students in the US: 50mm public, 5mm private).

But if you really want to look at where the disruptive models exist, you need to look at consumers who are completely opting out and in K12 education, that is the homeschooling movement.

My partner Andy sent around this tweet this morning and it is quite interesting:

I’m trying to understand which are the fastest growing trends in education. Homeschooling seems to be one of them. Technology is only getting into the space, that's why I assume the growth will be accelerated. #homeschooling#edtechpic.twitter.com/cr8RfOMBGW

In the US, we have almost as many students being homeschooled as are in the charter schools.

And homeschooling, which has its roots in the religious communities, is increasingly breaking out of that and slowly moving into the mainstream:

It has gotten much easier to consider homeschooling over the last twenty years via a combination of technology and infrastructure that has largely been developed by the early adopters of homeschooling.

I like going to hackathons. A number of USV portfolio companies have emerged out of hackathons, like our portfolio company Dapper which created its hit crypto-collectible game CryptoKitties at a Hackathon in late 2017.

So yesterday I headed down to NYC’s City Hall which was hosting the finals of a citywide hackathon competition (called The Hack League) among NYC schools to create the best software applications to make the city better.

The final projects were judged by people like the Chief Policy and Data Office (Comptroller’s office); the Chief Analytics Officer (City of NY); the Chief Technology Officer (Mayor’s office); the Executive Director of NYC311 (City of NY) and other folks in city government tasked with a similar mandate.

There were 28 finalist teams at City Hall yesterday competing to win the trophy. They were from all five boroughs, representing schools from all kinds of neighborhoods. It was as diverse as the city is and that is a wonderful thing.

I gave them a pep talk at the start of the day and encouraged them to “instrument their applications” so that they and others can determine how their users are getting value from them.

This is a photo I took of the students as I was about to address them:

Most of the students taking CS classes at school live in neighborhoods in NYC where there are no tech companies and they can’t see the pathway that they are on if they want to be. That is where the Annual Computer Science Fair comes in.

This year was the sixth annual CS Fair. We invite high school students who are taking CS classes to take the morning off from school and come to the Armory in Washington Heights and meet tech companies that they could one day work for and colleges/universities that they could attend.

I spent much of yesterday at the Fair and had the honor of taking Mayor de Blasio, who has been funding CS4All since the early days of his administration, through the event. Here are some photos from what is always a fantastic day for me.

I hope these young women made it over to the Etsy boothWhere they could have learned how Etsy uses data science to personalize everyone’s shopping experiencesThis young man from the Bronx made a multiplayer video game in javascript and told me and the Mayor that he wants to work for a tech company out of high school. I asked him to send me an email.This teacher from Information Technology High School in Queens had two teams of students showing software projects in the student showcase. She and her students took a selfie with the Mayor.

The Annual CS Fair would not be possible without the financial support of tech companies who underwrite the expenses. I would like to thank the major sponsors for making this possible.